Sessions & Shells

Inside a project you open two kinds of thing:

• a Session — an isolated Claude workspace: its own conversation and its own copy of your code, on its own git branch, or
• a Shell — a plain terminal in the project folder.

Both keep running in the background and are right where you left them when you reopen the app.

Open one

From a project in the sidebar:

• ＋ New session starts a Claude session (in a git repo, on its own spwn/… branch in its own worktree).
• ＋ New shell starts an ordinary interactive shell in the project folder.

Each opens as a tab in the main area. Click any entry in the sidebar to jump back to it.

Sessions vs shells

	Session	Shell
What it is	Claude, in a clean conversation view	A plain interactive terminal
Isolation	Own git branch + worktree (in a git repo)	Runs in the project folder directly
Use it for	Building features, exploring, agent work	git, builds, tests, one-off commands
Fork / Timeline / Merge	Yes	No

A shell is just a terminal — no conversation, no branch. Reach for it when you want to run something yourself. A session is the unit you explore, fork, and merge.

The full Claude experience

A session is the centerpiece of spwn: a clean, readable conversation on one side and the complete Claude Code experience on the other — so you can read and work comfortably without giving anything up. The working side is Claude Code itself, not a stripped-down copy:

• You type to Claude directly.
• Every slash-command works.
• Tool prompts — permission requests, pickers — appear and are answered right there, exactly as they would in the terminal.

In a git project, each session works on its own branch, in its own worktree, isolated from the others — so you can run several at once and merge the results back. See Branches & Merging.

The conversation view

Beside it, spwn shows a clean, scrollable view of the conversation. It stays in sync with the session and lets you act on individual turns:

• ＋ ctx saves a turn into the project’s Merge tray, so a useful exchange from one session can seed the next.
• ⑂ Fork branches a new session from that point.
• ↺ Return here rolls the session back to that point (see the Timeline).

Each session also has an Inspector with tabs for its changed files, its Timeline, its Hooks, and a ⤵ Merge… action to bring its branch back. See Branches & Merging and Project Hooks.

They survive restarts

Every session and shell keeps running even when you close spwn. Quit the app and reopen it, and each is exactly where you left it — scrollback, history, and any running program (a build, a dev server, a long Claude task) all intact. You never lose work just because you closed the window.

Next

• Branches & Merging — how sessions get their own branch.
• Fork & Timeline — branch and roll back sessions.
• Merge Tray — seed a new session with saved context.